Distributors

US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order setting up the National Strategic Computing Initiative that will adopt a coordinated strategy involving multiple government agencies, academia and the private sector for the development of high-performance computing systems.

Adopting a "whole-of-government" approach, involving all departments and agencies with expertise and interests in HPC, one of the objectives of the NSCI will be to speed up the delivery of "a capable exascale computing system that integrates hardware and software capability to deliver approximately 100 times the performance of current 10 petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs."

China currently leads the supercomputer race with the Tianhe-2 computer, developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, heading the list for over two years. The Tianhe-2's maximum achieved performance of 33.86 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark is almost double that of Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer installed at the U.S. Department of Energy, which rated 17.59 petaflops per second, according to latest edition of the Top500 list of the world's top supercomputers.

The U.S. still has the largest number of supercomputers on the Top500 list with 233 such computers, down from 265 on the November 2013 list.

The government appears to want to remedy that situation. "Maximizing the benefits of HPC in the coming decades will require an effective national response to increasing demands for computing power, emerging technological challenges and opportunities, and growing economic dependency on and competition with other nations," Obama wrote in his order on Wednesday.

One of the objectives of the NSCI will be to provide a viable path over the next 15 years, even after the limits of current semiconductor technology are reached in the "post- Moore's law era." The law named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicts the doubling of transistor density approximately every two years, allowing chips to get faster and cheaper.

The three lead agencies for the NSCI will be the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation, each focusing on different areas of HPC. They will work with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), described as foundational research and development agencies. While IARPA will focus on alternatives to standard semiconductor computing technologies, NIST will focus on measurement science.

Obama has also named deployment agencies, which are essentially key user agencies that could participate and influence the design of systems, software and applications, to integrate their special requirements. These agencies are NASA, the FBI, the National Institutes of Health, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The NSCI executive council, co-chaired by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, will submit an implementation plan within 90 days of Obama's order.

Obama did not, however, announce a timeline for the creation of the supercomputer. The Department of Energy has said it plans to develop and deliver exascale computing systems by 2023-24, with a hundred to thousand-fold increase in sustained performance over current computing capabilities. A department task force said last year an incremental US$3 billion in investment would be required over 10 years to deliver the exascale computing.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

Channel Deals

Tely HD Pro & Wireless Audiopod

ARN Distributor Directory

ARN Vendor Directory

Slideshows

​Inside the new HP Customer Welcome Centre in Sydney…

HP unveiled its new Customer Welcome Centre (CWC) in Sydney this week, following on more than a year after the vendor opened the doors of its Experience Centre in Melbourne (MEC). The new space offers on-site HP technicians and visiting channel partners the ability to reconfigure equipment and put together tailored solutions based on the needs of individual end clients or target vertical markets. The centre can also be booked by customers and partners for meetings, events, workshops, seminars, and training. Photos by HP.

Zscaler Australia toasts the channel at Xmas drinks

Zscaler recently hosted its partner update and Christmas drinks event in Australia where more than 20 partners attended the event at the QT hotel in the Sydney. The event provided a forum for the company to update its Australian partners on the company's strategy for cloud security in the year ahead. It was also a great opportunity for the company to introduce Sean Kopelke as country manager for A/NZ. The event ended with Christmas drinks and a celebration of momentum gained in 2016.

IN PICTURES: ​Nutanix X Tours

Nutanix recently held two ‘X Tours’, which brought the company’s flagship event .NEXT to Brisbane and Melbourne. Customers and partners got a firsthand look at the new era of IT and exposure to the potential of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform. Both events featured key speakers both from Nutanix and its partners.

iasset.com is a channel management ecosystem that automates all major aspects of the entire sales, marketing and service process, including data tracking, integrated learning, knowledge management and product lifecycle management.

Copyright 2016 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.